I finally visited the High Line in May even though the park had been opened in 2009. It hasn’t taken me quite as long to get to the new extension, which opened in June, and it is still amazing to see what has been created out of a disused railway line:

Happily, the same elated reaction that greeted the first segment occurred again this summer, as the newly completed middle portion of the High Line revealed that rather than being simply more of the same, the park is evolving into a much more varied experience than many had anticipated. The newly completed half-mile stretch feels different from the first in that its route is straighter and narrower (two tracks wide as opposed to four in the southernmost section). It makes fewer jogs and lacks the extravagantly sweeping arc of the northern end of the viaduct, which will bring the High Line to a dramatic culmination when the entire project is finished. (The New York Review of Books )

Around the watchers, the city still made its everyday noises. Car horns. Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pothole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweet spots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouser legs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.

Out of all the books I have read that are set in New York, Colum McCann has done the best job in capturing the everyday energy of the city.

The passage above truly describes the constant noise that accompanies that energy, so it was very eerie when the city fell silent while waiting for Hurricane Irene. Unlike Vermont and the Catskills, Manhattan was lucky enough to escape without serious damage and the precautions, some of which are seen in these photos, proved unnecessary.

To me, the purest beauty is the world of mathematics. Its perfect assemblage of numbers, magnitudes and forms persist, independent of us. The aesthetic experience of the sublime in mathematics is awe-inspiring. It is similar to the experience we have when we confront the vast magnitude of the universe, which always leaves us open-mouthed.

Although the High Line was opened as a park in 2009 it has taken me two years to get there.

The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s largest industrial district. No trains have run on the High Line since 1980. Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, formed in 1999 when the historic structure was under threat of demolition.